I have a QNAP TS-112 and it won’t spin down when my WDTV SMP is on standby (waited a whole day). The QNAP analyzer tool shows disk writes in about every minute or so. If I’m lucky I can also see it from Windows Explorer: a directory named NAS (this is the network name of the NAS) is created in the movie folders and deleted after a moment.
I have set the media library network share update to 1 day. Is there anything else I can do to keep the WDTV from bugging the NAS constantly?
Switching the WDTV off completely allows the NAS to spin down in exchange for slow startup. I could also disallow the Media Library if need be, although I would miss the Get Content Info menu then. That could be solved by switching to ThumbGen. But I’d like to know the cause first.
Once you get the media content you can turn off the media library and access the QNAP by network shares. The media info/backgrounds/etc will still be displayed. Just re-enable the media library when you add new movies. I have manual mode set for get content and just use the options button when in media library to gather the information. Another advantage of this method is that the items will display by file name order in network shares rather than movie title order in media library. ie. “The” in the beginning of so many titles wont be a factor in the sort.
Thanks, it would be one way to sort this out, although a little uncomfortable. (If only manual Get Media Info would work on subfolders and multiple files…)
It would still be good to know whether it is really the Media Library that casues this, not some other database building component. Saying this because I have set Media Library to Manual Only as well and still the problem remains.
I have the scan for my network shares set for once a month not standby. Otherwise when power is off ( standby unless you do a three second power off to reall shut it down) it will scan the NAS and may not allow it to hibernate\sleep or may time it out if it does sleep and doesn’t wake up quickenough.
My Synology has no problem going into hibernation. The problem I have is when the Media Library is enabled the network drive gets flagged as removed. I believe it is due to insufficient wait time is set in firmware to allow for the NAS to wakeup and respond. This is not a problem when using Linux shares without Media Library on. As a test I disabled hibernation on my NAS and I never lost my network shares when Media Library was on. Renabled hibernation on the NAS with Media Library on and within a few hours the Network shares are lost.
I tried to turn off the Media Library, it didn’t help. When I force the disk to go to standby, it starts up again within a second until I cut the power to the WDTV. The Samba file connections.tdb gets written. It seems that the WDTV aggressively polls the share in every second or so.
Sorry cant help with the Samba connection (CIFS). I use the Linux Share (NFS) because of the higher performance. I dont see any polling effect. NAS goes to sleep just like its supposed to even if the WDTV is on (watching Netflix).
I just ran wireshark on our Samba server (where the media files are stored), and I see each of our two SMPs sending four SMB-related packets to the server exactly every five minutes. WIll have to investigate further to see what their purpose is.
EDIT: actually, it is the Samba server that is initiating the communication, sending packets to the SMPs that wireshark identifies as Netbios session keep-alive messages. So I don’t see the SMPs initiating any contact with the Samba server, and this is with them not even in stand-by. The only other network traffic involving the SMPs that I see at the Samba server are periodic SSDP broadcasts, which are apparently part of UPnp.
OOPS: So from this capture session I see NO network traffic originating from an SMP that should keep your NAS active.
Interesting findings. Would it do any harm if I disabled keepalive in Samba?
No idea, but you can certainly try. 
You might want to check out the smb.conf documentation: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/smb.conf.5.html
It appears there are two relevant options: keepalive and so_keepalive. The default for keepalive is said to be 300 secs (5min), which is exactly what I am seeing.
@jamesBond007. Have you tried using NFS to connect to the NAS instead of CIFS? I do believe the NAS will sleep like you want and you will get increased throughput due to less network overhead.
I’m using the NAS from Win8 Home computers besides the WDTV and AFAIK it has no NFS client (only Enterprise has). I may try a 3rd party client when I get the time.
Disabling keepalive didn’t help. If WDTV is on standby, NAS isn’t. Don’t know who sends what to who, but all other computers are off and exactly 15 minutes after I power off the WDTV with the long button press, NAS spins down. I give up and will get used to the slow startup.
Dont quite understand what the Win8 Home computers have to do with your problem. Your NAS supports both protocols. I perform my rips etc on a Win7 machine and write or transfer to the NAS via Samba (CIFS) but the WDTV connects to the NAS via Linux shares (NFS). So no need to run a 3rd party NFS addin such as Hanewin.
Not sure what the problem could be since the NAS’ SMB server should be quite similar a standard Samba server, and I sure don’t see any network traffic from our two SMPs that would wake up an NAS. One thing though is that I didn’t have ours in standby–they were simply sitting at the home page. Perhaps you might want to make one last attempt, simply leaving yours at the home page instead of putting it into standby. I never both using standby, as I see no reason to. E.g., the SMP doesn’t feel any cooler when in standby than when just sitting not doing any processing.
You certainly could also try using NFS from the NAS to share to the SMP. You should be able to leave the SMB shares and just add some NFS shares. That won’t disrupt your WIndows access. Then simply reconfigure the SMP media player to remove the SMB shares and instead use the NFS shares.
Sorry, I thought this requires disabling Samba.
Tried NFS, no luck.
Also tried to disable the share server on the WDTV, no luck
Disabled Twonky, still nothing
Turned on the connection log of the NAS. It did not record any attempts. (My Win8 computer does nag the NAS when turned on, which is another annoying issue, but it was off for the test.
ncarver wrote: Then simply reconfigure the SMP media player to remove the SMB shares and instead use the NFS shares.
I will try to leave it on. Not sure what you mean by removing the SMB shares. The media library is turned off and I can only select another share with the red button but I see no way to remove anything.
There is no difference when leaving the SMP on. I have set the NAS to spin down in 5 minutes now, it actually made it once but spun up again in a minute. When I sit close to it, I hear the hard disk head moving.
I’m positive that the problem occurs since I bought the SMP. It doesn’t mean though that it’s the SMP’s fault. QNAP NAS-es have notorious spindown problems this just may be an unlucky combination.
I have a choice to make my media player dumb by disabling everything useful or turn it off when not used. I think the latter is better.
Thanks all for trying to help.
What I mean about removing the SMB shares was that when you add NFS share to Media Library, be sure to delete the SMB shares, so you are definitely just using NFS. Sounds like that advice was irrelevant.
No idea what could be wrong, as there is absolutely no network traffic coming to my Samba server from either of our two SMPs, so I see no way an SMP could be waking your NAS up every minute or so. A mystery.
